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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25648708">I know that other things are not of consequence</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch'>middlemarch</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Community (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Breakfast, Conversation, Do-Over, F/M, Post-Canon Fix-It, Romance, season 6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-01</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 12:35:27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,386</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25648708</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Something was ringing. It wasn't his alarm. It was his fucking doorbell.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Annie Edison/Jeff Winger</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>89</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>I know that other things are not of consequence</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“I want a do-over,” Annie announced. It was a brisk October Sunday morning, the sunlight hiding nothing, and Jeff was glad he was wearing a halfway-decent navy blue v-neck from J. Crew and track pants instead of only his increasingly threadbare pajama bottoms. He was barefoot but that somehow didn’t count.</p><p>“Annie. Won’t you come in?” he asked, gesturing towards his living room. She had that look in her eyes, there wasn’t any use in challenging her. Certainly not at his front door, where it would be undeniably rude to conduct an interrogation. Also, he hadn’t had his first cup of coffee.</p><p>“I brought breakfast, but not as a bribe,” Annie said. She walked in like she owned the place, which he obscurely felt was true though he couldn’t for the life of him have come up with a really compelling argument to support it, especially since the last time they’d met, he’d given her a chaste kiss that was supposed to mean <i>Goodbye my love farewell</i> and instead had led to Annie in a tailored blazer, dark-wash jeans and magenta Converse (Converse!) tucking her canvas messenger bag by his couch and taking out what looked like Parisian croissants and a tub of mixed berries from the reusable bag emblazoned with <b>Greendale Goes Green</b> in chartreuse Craig must have been totally drunk on pago-pagos when he’d picked out.</p><p>“I’d take a bribe,” Jeff said. </p><p>“I know you would. That’s still not what this is,” Annie said.</p><p>“Okay. It’s breakfast. Roger that. Should I put on a pot of coffee? Or I might have that jasmine tea you like.” It felt like they had done this a thousand times before though he couldn’t actually think of when they’d had ever had breakfast alone in his apartment</p><p>“Maybe later,” Annie said. She paused then, maybe waiting to see if he’d jump in, try to take control of the conversation but he was mostly just enjoying looking at her in the autumn sunlight. The months without her had seemed interminable, which was a weird choice of words for his internal monologue, since he’d determined to send her away for her own good; how had he been impatient for her return?</p><p>“I didn’t like how we left things,” she said, pitching her voice low and sweet, without smiling.</p><p>“It was for the best—” he began.</p><p>“It was stupid,” she said. “I’ll admit, I went along with it, too much, but it was mostly you.”</p><p>“What?”</p><p>“You, being all noble, setting me free or pushing me out of the nest or whatever the heck you thought you were doing. Pretending it was all about me,” Annie said, shaking her head slightly. “What utter baloney.”</p><p>“Annie, I don’t understand,” he said.</p><p>“Bullshit, Jeff. It was bullshit and it’s bullshit that you don’t understand,” she said. “It wasn’t about me. And it shouldn’t have been about you.”</p><p>“Tell me then,” he said and that got a real smile, a new one that he somehow recognized and didn’t want to share.</p><p>“It was us. We danced around it, but I told you I was I in love with you and you told me you were in love with me and then somehow, you decided how you felt was a trap for me. A dead end. As if that were true and like you got to decide for me. As if being in love would ruin everything else,” Annie said. “I think you watched too many Lifetime movies.”</p><p>“I watched one. Because you made me,” Jeff said, knowing he was taking the easy way out. </p><p>“I didn’t make you do anything. I talked about one and I said I thought you might like it and you’re avoiding what’s important again,” Annie said, taking about three steps closer, so she was near enough he could smell her perfume, hyacinth and jasmine. </p><p>“Why don’t we sit down and talk about it,” he suggested, as if he were in control. Or maybe as if he were a decent host. Annie was polite enough not to dismiss either possibility. But then she sat right beside him on the couch when he’d expected her to take the Danish modern knockoff sling chair. Now he could smell the sandalwood base to her perfume and beneath it, the scent of her warm skin.</p><p>“This is a good idea. Now I don’t have to break my neck looking up at you,” Annie remarked. “And you can’t use your resemblance to a giraffe as a proxy for wisdom or authority.”</p><p>“This is the do-over? Scolding me?” He didn’t say she was still giving him the doe-eyes because it wasn’t like there was anything she could do about it and also, he liked it.</p><p>“The do-over is we drop all the ageist nonsense and you recognize I’m an adult. I went to an internship that was never going to become a flipping direct admit to the FBI, so I came back, like I always expected to,” Annie said. “You get honest with me about whether ‘the heart wants what it wants’ is still what you mean.”</p><p>“Okay,” he said.</p><p>“Okay, what?” she pressed.</p><p>“Yes, I still feel that way,” Jeff said. “For the record, I also still feel I’m too old for you and you’re better off on your own.”</p><p>“That’s just your own self-loathing talking,” Annie said.</p><p>“Now you’re a therapist?” </p><p>“No, I just know you,” she said.</p><p>“What if you’re wrong?” Jeff asked.</p><p>“What if I am? People are wrong and then they’re right or sometimes it’s not about right and wrong,” Annie said. </p><p>“I don’t want to close any doors for you. I don’t want you to regret anything,” Jeff said. </p><p>“I’ve got news for you—I’m going to regret some of my choices. I already do. That’s life. And when it goes well, you have someone to sit with on a couch at the end of the day and talk about the crappy parts with, someone who makes sure there’s a pint of your favorite Cherry Garcia ice cream in the freezer even though he would never eat it or who makes a funny face to make you smile or swings you into a tango in the kitchen while you’re trying to load the dishwasher properly.”</p><p>“Wow. You’ve really imagined this out,” Jeff said. “You don’t think I load the dishwasher properly?”</p><p>“You’re not supposed to put the knives in,” she said, as if she hadn’t terrifyingly just given him everything he wanted. “Jeff, tell me. Do you still love me?”</p><p>“I already told you,” he said.</p><p>“No, you said ‘okay’ and ‘yes, I still feel that way,’” she said. </p><p>“I still love you. Very much,” he said. “Even if I shouldn’t.”</p><p>“You should,” she said, leaning in, resting one hand on his shoulder. “This is part of the do-over, okay?”</p><p>“What is?” he said, very softly. He had a clue, he wasn’t a total imbecile, no matter what her opinion was, but he found he wanted her to say it. He’d always been a greedy asshole.</p><p>“A real kiss. Not goodbye,” she said. He felt her smile against his mouth and then she was kissing him in earnest, the most Annie Edison kiss imaginable, ardent, thoughtful, thorough. Overwhelming. And then he lifted one hand to her cheek and she made a low, hungry sound he instantly knew he’d never tire of, arched up against him and started to laugh when he wrestled ineffectively with her stupid, stupid blazer.</p><p>“This would be easier with one of your little cardigans,” he muttered.</p><p>“I didn’t want to make it easy for you,” she said, her hands stroking his back under his sweater; she had already gotten it halfway off him. “You like a challenge.”</p><p>“I do,” he said, looking at her and kissing her again before she had time to make him explain with words.</p>
<hr/><p>His sweater was dangling from the arm of the Danish modern knock-off and her left Converse was somehow on the breakfast bar next to the croissants when she spoke her next full sentence. She was still breathless which Jeff was possibly unnecessarily proud of.</p><p>“I’m going to law school. What about you?”</p><p>Jeff considered his options, his prospects, the impossible blue of Annie’s eyes. What she saw. What he wanted to see.</p><p>“I’m going to learn to tango.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>The title is from the same letter by Emily Dickinson where she wrote "The Heart wants what it wants."</p><p>As someone who got married in my 20s and spent the decade moving forward in my professional training, I call shenanigans on Dan Harmon's take on how Annie should spend hers.</p><p>While composed of exotic-drink essentials such as rum, pineapple and lime juice, the Pago Pago ratchets up the complexity by adding a touch of green Chartreuse, and levels out the flavor with a grace note of crème de cacao.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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